Meshes of Anamorphosis

HIDDEN FACES--Salvador Dali--Dial ($3).

This week New England's latest flowering produced a veritable rum blossom. Written in "implacable" 14-hour stretches during a four-month "retirement in the mountains of New Hampshire," Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali's Hidden Faces is the year's tipsiest first novel.

For Novelist Dali Hidden Faces is a revealing study of contemporary French high society. It is also "an anagram sealed in the fire of my personality and in the blood of my wife." Some of its surrealistic characters:

P:Beautiful Veronica Stevens, who was in love with a masked aviator whose face she had never seen. She used to beat "her mother over the head with a telephone." Reason: Mrs. Stevens' "biological need for the absolute" filled her with a desire to make tailored suits to cover the "indecent" shapes of streamlined automobiles.

P:Betka, Veronica's voluptuous girl friend, whose "pure teeth savagely crunched stalks of celery that broke in her mouth like icicles of spring." One day she received a one-word telegram from her mother in Poland. It said: "Suka" (Russian for bitch).

P:Madame de Montluc,on, who once showed Senator Daudier her low-necked Chanel dress, which crawled with "rather large pearl caterpillars." "Quite edible," said the Senator, "but I should have preferred to have the caterpillars served in a separate dish."

P:Suave Count Herve de Grandsailles, who gave a brilliant dinner party where "congested epiderms . . . empurpled the candelabra," and the guests' faces were "caught in the ferocious meshes of anamorphosis." With "faint but delightful anguish" the Count detected in the "immaculate turgescence" of his cream cheese "the animal femininity of the she-goat."

Cork Trees and Seduction. Count Grandsailles was France's most brilliant statesman. "With the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner the Count would mildly bring out the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, and with the rightist ideas of his left-hand partner, he would moderately develop the leftist ideas of his right-hand partner." His chief passion was planting cork trees. But for five years the Count had practised "mutual seduction" with beautiful Solange de Cleda. A horse-lover, he "was always tempted to tap Solange on the buttocks and give her a piece of sugar." Solange liked to fall on her knees in a crowded room and, "feebly muttering," wind her arms around the Count's legs.

After the Germans invaded France (machine-gun "rays . . . made . . . deep incisions [in] the loathsome yolks of eggs fried in boiling oil") Count Grandsailles was sent to Casablanca by the Vichy Government. Vichy thought he was loyal. But the Count was chiefly interested in planting more & more cork trees. "All I want," he told the admiring North Africans, "is an Arab revolt within 48 hours." "You shall have [it]," cried Communist Professor Brousillon, "but it may cost the lives of several Communists."

Later the Count fled to the U.S. under an assumed name. He was seen at the Frick Museum. "All the real or fanciful memories of his prolix love experiences strewn in disorder along the semiprecious beach of his life were now gathered together and arranged by his libido in the great hierarchical and opalescent vase of his sybaritic egoism." So he was glad to meet Veronica Stevens, who was now living in Palm Springs with Betka, the Polish girl.

Pearl Thighs and Centaur Sweat. Veronica spent most of her time horseback-riding--"the mother-of-pearl pincers of her thighs pressing the animal's flanks and blending with it in a pearly communion of centaur sweat." Betka had had a child before she left Paris: the father was probably the masked aviator, though it might have been three acrobats. But Veronica was not jealous. When she recalled her masked aviator, "her will fluttered like the star-spangled banner."

Later, the Count pretended to be the masked man. He "pressed Veronica to him with that enveloping and symmetrical suavity that he seemed to have inherited from the trimmed foliage of old French parks." She and the Count were "united in a single tremulousness." Then they got married.

Veronica loved the Count "with the harmonious turbulence of all her viscera." But the Count was still in love with Solange (he had left her in France). He had only "a sentimental veneration for [Veronica's] vacant, meningitic stare," though he liked to surprise her "by refined flashes of turpitude." Soon, "life became like a bath in a tepid lake." "If one day I decided to kill myself," mused the Count. "I should choose the moment immediately after the radio had announced the despairing and inexorable phrase, 'Bulova Watch Time.'"

Convulsions and Euphoria. They planned to build a house in California, ringed by "a paradise of palms shuddering with fornicating birds." The Count studied demonology and tried to make love to Solange by physical telepathy and black magic.

One day an aviator came to visit them. "Veronica!" he cried. "The cross [the Count] is wearing is the one you gave me!" It was the masked man. Veronica divorced the Count.

When World War II ended, the Count sped back to France. But his demoniacal visitations had given Solange "convulsions that racked her . . . with euphoric climaxes." "He is coming!" she cried. "Wait just one last moment before nailing me down!" Meanwhile the Count's heart "contracted at the sight of the young cork [trees] that had grown during his absence." Though Solange had died, the Count knew that the pulse of France was beating as strongly as ever--"the truffles truffled . . . the snail slavered, the manure manured, the cemetery rotted, the preserves preserved, the rabbit's blood dripped. ..."

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